Sabermetrics

Sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball data. Sabermetrics aims to quantify baseball players’ performances based on objective statistical measurements, especially in opposition to many of the established statistics (such as, for example, runs batted in and pitching wins) that give less accurate approximations of individual efficacy. While the term sabermetrics applies only to baseball, similar advanced statistical analyses have gained popularity in nearly every other spectator sport during the 21st century.

“A year ago,” baseball historian and statistician Bill James wrote in 1980, “I wrote [...] that what I do does not have a name and cannot be explained in a sentence or two. Well, now I have given it a name: Sabermetrics, the first part to honor the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research, the second part to indicate measurement. Sabermetrics is the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records.”

Later, James would define sabermetrics more broadly as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” This definition leaves room for just about anything, including the traditional box score. In practice, sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball statistics and other evaluations that have already been recorded.

Early analytic efforts

In 1906 sportswriter Hugh Fullerton applied his own brand of baseball analysis and concluded that the Chicago White Sox—known as “the Hitless Wonders”—would beat the crosstown Chicago Cubs in that year’s World Series. When the White Sox did upset the heavily favoured Cubs, Fullerton looked like a lonely genius. In 1910 Fullerton published an article titled “The Inside Game: The Science of Baseball” in The American Magazine, based on his stopwatch-anchored analysis of 10,074 batted balls.

Shortly after joining the staff of Baseball Magazine about 1911, writer F.C. Lane began railing about the inadequacy of batting average as an indicator of performance. As Lane noted, it made little sense to count a single the same as a home run, and eventually he devised his own (generally accurate) values for singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. During his 26-year tenure as editor of Baseball Magazine, Lane regularly published articles challenging the conventional wisdom regarding baseball statistics.

Fullerton and Lane, however, remained voices in the wilderness, and nobody within the baseball establishment seems to have paid much attention to advanced statistical analyses—with the possible exception of freethinking executive Branch Rickey. Famous for signing Jackie Robinson, who would famously integrate the major leagues in 1947, Rickey also employed statistical analyst Allan Roth, who once said, “Baseball is a game of percentages. I try to find the actual percentage.” In 1954 Life magazine published an article attributed to Rickey, but masterminded by Roth, titled “Goodby to Some Old Baseball Ideas,” which was devoted to the proposition that a team’s performance might be accurately explained by an abstruse statistical formula. Again nobody paid much attention.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, George Lindsey, a Canadian, published original statistical research on baseball in scientific journals. In 1964 Earnshaw Cook’s book Percentage Baseball was published, and his work, or at least the broadest outlines of it, reached a wide audience via a profile in Sports Illustrated. Not many people within the game would admit to paying Cook much mind, but longtime executive Lou Gorman kept Percentage Baseball close at hand, and player Davey Johnson took some of the book’s lessons to heart—particularly, the importance of on-base percentage (the measurement of how frequently a batter safely reaches base)—and later became one of baseball’s top managers. (One of Johnson’s managers in the majors was future Hall of Famer Earl Weaver, who managed according to a number of what would become sabermetric precepts, including an emphasis on high-scoring innings rather than one-run strategies.)

In 1969 The Baseball Encyclopedia, the first comprehensive compendium of major-league baseball statistics that reached all the way back to 1871, was published. An immediate sensation, The Baseball Encyclopedia—or “Big Mac,” as aficionados called it in honour of its publisher, Macmillan—was not really sabermetrics, but countless inspired amateurs mined its wealth of data for their own sabermetric efforts.

The first of those amateurs to make a real name for himself was a young Kansan named Bill James. In 1977 James self-published his first Baseball Abstract, which was filled with original studies based on information James had gleaned from The Baseball Encyclopedia and box scores in The Sporting News. A few years later a profile of James in Sports Illustrated made him famous, and in 1982 the first mass-marketed Baseball Abstract landed in bookstores.

Two years later The Hidden Game of Baseball, coauthored by John Thorn and sabermetrician Pete Palmer, was published. In addition to summarizing a number of the key sabermetric principles known at the time, it also popularized “linear weights,” which essentially hearkened back to Lane’s work of many decades earlier. Palmer took the concept to a different level, with his numbers later appearing in a massive encyclopaedia, Total Baseball.

Meanwhile, James continued to write, in his lively style, annual editions of his Baseball Abstract through 1988. Among his more-notable sabermetric creations that first appeared in the Baseball Abstract were:

Runs created. To measure a hitter’s overall contribution to the offense (“runs created”), James assigned various weights to all of his measured hitting and baserunning actions.

Pythagorean winning percentage. James established that there existed a direct and empirical relationship between a team’s runs scored and allowed and its wins and losses, enabling one to derive a team’s expected winning percentage based on its run differential.

Defensive spectrum. James recognized a clear scale of fielding difficulty, with first base on the left (easier) end and shortstop on the right (more difficult) extreme; as James noted, the majority of players moved from right to left on the spectrum as they aged.

Major-league equivalencies. James established a measurable relationship between a minor-league hitter’s statistics and their major-league equivalents. He would later write that probably the most important among all his discoveries was that “minor-league statistics do matter.”

In 2002 James published the 729-page Win Shares, in which he outlined a method that resulted in the performance of every player in major-league history being summed up by a single number for each season based on his contributions as a hitter, fielder, base runner, or pitcher. James’s method had been preceded by Palmer’s Total Player Rating and would be succeeded by various versions of Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which was predicated on the identification of the value of a theoretical “replacement player” (a player readily available, whether from a team’s bench or its farm system). Eventually WAR would become ever more sophisticated, with the different versions propagated on different Web sites.

Also in 2002, the Boston Red Sox hired James to work as a senior consultant to co-owner John Henry and general manager Theo Epstein, who had been reading James’s work for many years. Earlier in the year, the Red Sox had hired a young man named Robert (“Vörös”) McCracken, who had recently made an important new discovery: major-league pitchers differed little from one another in their ability to prevent batted balls from becoming hits. McCracken’s Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) theory suggested that a pitcher had significant control over walks, strikeouts, and home runs, but if the batter hit the ball into the field of play, most of what happened next was due to luck, at least from the pitcher’s perspective. Although controversial, DIPS would be borne out, if clarified somewhat, by many subsequent studies.

McCracken and James were not the first sabermetricians to work for baseball teams. Earlier, for example, analyst Eddie Epstein had worked for the Baltimore Orioles and San Diego Padres, and Craig Wright plied his trade for the Texas Rangers under the title “sabermetrician.” McCracken’s hiring, however, showed that someone writing on the Internet with enough original thinking could get a job inside the sport, and James’s hiring made national headlines. With James, the Red Sox would make history: in 2004 the team won its first World Series since 1918, leading some to suggest that science had trumped the legendary “Curse of the Bambino.” (The Red Sox won another championship three years later, with James still working behind the scenes.)

The rise of advanced statistics

In 2003 Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball—an inside look at the Oakland Athletics and their general manager Billy Beane—was published. Beane had earlier served as an understudy to Athletics general manager Sandy Alderson, who had read James’s Baseball Abstract while constructing a roster that won three straight American League (AL) championships beginning in 1988. Alderson introduced Beane, an ex-player, to the Baseball Abstract in the mid-1990s. “[T]hat was the big moment,” Beane recalled, “when I figured out that all the stuff Sandy was talking about was just derivative of Bill James.”

The runaway commercial and artistic success of Moneyball (which became a hit movie nearly a decade later) spurred a number of major-league owners and executives to take sabermetrics more seriously, and over the next few years there was a rush to hire sabermetricians, many of whom first wrote for numbers-oriented Web sites like Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, and The Hardball Times. Among these sabermetricians’ duties was parsing the incredible wealth of data provided to the teams—and, to some degree, the public—by a company called Sportvision, which set up cameras in every stadium and tracked just about everything that might be recorded. The amount of data compiled by technology systems known as PITCHf/x, HITf/x, COMMANDf/x, and FIELDf/x was astounding. However, by 2015, a new camera-based tracking system had been installed in every Major League Baseball (MLB) stadium, and the resulting output, dubbed Statcast, provided the teams—and, to a lesser degree, amateur and professional analysts outside of front offices—with a wealth of new information that allowed unprecedented accuracy of measuring virtually everything that happens during a baseball game. This data was enough to keep teams of number crunchers busy, leading to a sort of arms race as front offices attempted to scoop up bright young analysts to work with the data.

By 2012 essentially all of MLB’s 30 franchises employed at least one sabermetrician, although there was a wide range of emphasis placed by management on the work of those employees. In 2008 the Tampa Bay Rays, relying heavily on sabermetrics, went from perennial AL doormats to perennial contenders, qualifying for the postseason three times in four years. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Giants won championships in 2010, 2012, and 2014 while giving relatively short shrift to modern analysis.